Customer Reviews

Elizabeth Bishop (Voices & Visions)

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Is it reasonable to assume that a one-hour cassette tape entitled 'Elizabeth Bishop' includes poetry read by Bishop herself? Perhaps not. Surely, though, such a tape would include complete Bishop poems adequately read by someone. Guess again. The tape in question is a hodge-podge of comments by UNIDENTIFIED people about Bishop's poetry. Octavio Paz has an accent, so one can identify him, and I think the quavery, crusty voice is Mary McCarthy's -- but who knows for sure? An extremely self-conscious woman (unidentified) reads about half a dozen strangely expurgated poems. There is no indication either on the cassette case or on the tape itself that the poems have been edited. Why edit short poems anyway? You'll have to ask someone at Mystic Fire Audio.

The reviewers here miss an important point. If they found a book entitled "Elizabeth Bishop," they would assume it would be about her and her poetry (the tape does contain poems read by the poet as well). While the one reviewer is correct in stating this was originally a video, the audio has 90% of what the listener needs. And as for any good reader, imagination must fill in the rest. It's unlikely one will find a tape so insightful an opening into Bishop's work.

This tape is an excellent introduction to the work of Elizabeth Bishop. It has excellent renditions of her poems along with interviews with people who knew and loved her. It is an hour-long glimse of EB. One should not think that it replaces the need for her recordings of the poetry (although it is possible that the versions on this tape are better than EB's) or a good biography. This tape is an excellent program from an excellent series.

You are absolutely right that the poems on this tape are strangely edited and that the voice reading them is NOT Bishop's. It is the actress Blythe Danner, who has a wonderful voice, but hearing Bishop's poems delivered in such a dramatic style is a little jarring for those who have heard Bishop's own quiet, understated way of reading.

I suspect the reason that this tape sounds strange is that it is the audio track of a video. If you get the original Voices & Visions video, which many libraries have, you can see the faces of Mary McCarthy, Jimmy Merrill, Octavio Paz and others of Bishop's friends as they speak. It has other nice touches, such as the old blue bus with a rounded hood used to illustrate "The Moose." You could swear it was really filmed along the "moose road" in Nova Scotia, (now hiway 2) the very road Bishop would have travled when she went home to Great Village, passing through Five Islands, the Economies, Five Houses, Bass River, and so on.

Bishop herself can be heard on Random House's "Voice of the Poet" audio tape, a nice compilation of her voice over about 30 years. I don't believe she was ever recorded reading "One Art," so you might try reading it for yourself after you hear the poet's sometimes laconic, sometimes offhand way of reading her own work.